Every winter, the tastemakers at First Avenue take stock of the music scene with the annual Best New Bands concert. Your fledgling music career isn't necessarily over if you're not booked for Wednesday's show, but notable local luminaries who have played the event include Trip Shakespeare (1986), Low (1994), Jeremy Messersmith (2006) and Lookbook (2008). Now, meet the upstart Twin Cities acts who made the cut in 2010.

Theirs is the album cover with a guy pulling his underwear up into his crack. Theirs is the music video with not one but two scenes of booger picking. Theirs are the YouTube tour-diary clips where one guy is trying to light his farts on fire, while another is yelling at the band manager for kicking him in the crotch.

Ladies and gentleman, meet the future of rock 'n' roll in the Twin Cities.

"What's the point of being in a rock band if you can't act like you're 14?" Goondas guitarist Jackson Atkins asked.

"We can't afford to trash hotel rooms yet, so we have to do what we can," drummer Josh Miller added.

The Goondas have certainly earned the right to act like juvenile delinquents, decadent rock stars or whatever they want to be so long as they're only hurting themselves. Which they do quite frequently. In its short year and a half of literally tearing up stages, the quartet has quickly worked its way up to being co-named the best local live act in our Twin Cities Critics Tally 2010 and earning a choice slot at Wednesday's Best New Bands showcase at First Avenue.

During an interview last week at bassist Andy Meuwissen's memorabilia-filled attic space in south Minneapolis -- Boy George, Sid Vicious and John Belushi adorned the walls, and the Animals and Kinks were on the stereo -- the band members emphasized just how serious they are about their hard-stomping, head-bobbing brand of bluesy garage-punk. Even as they mocked each other and just about everything else surrounding the band.

All four members vividly remembered their "ugly," "miserable," "painful" show at the 400 Bar in the spring of 2009. They stunk up the place so bad, the Goondas didn't play live again for seven months.

Prior to that hard-learned lesson, the four school friends from the Chaska and Chanhassen area -- ages 23-24 -- cut their teeth covering Black Sabbath, the Pixies, Led Zeppelin and other rock giants at suburban bars such as Schmitty's in Victoria. "We still go back and play there anytime we need money for recording or whatever," Atkins proudly noted.

At the 400, they tried to make the switch from covers to originals by playing a meagerly written batch of songs while attempting the wild, bouncing-off-the-walls shtick that is now their trademark. Said Atkins, "We realized if we were going to be the kind of original band we want to be, we couldn't do it half-ass."

After they hunkered down to work up their act, it's not too clichéd to say the Goondas came back storming. Their first gig after the hiatus was at the Terminal Bar, where they smashed an old practice guitar on the stage, kicked over the drums and monitors, smuggled in a (stolen) $200 bottle of whiskey and "wound up bleeding all over the place," they remembered.

"An older guy at the bar came up to me afterward and said, 'I saw the Who in 1968, and I haven't seen anything like that since,'" Meuwissen boasted (with nary a smirk to suggest he was fibbing).

"When I'd hit the drums, I'd be blasting vomit up into my face," he remembered. "But I kept playing."

The wildest performance, they agreed, was their CD-release party at the 331 Club last summer. Champagne was spewed everywhere. Green crowd-surfed all over the bar. He also climbed over the partition wall by the bathrooms.

"I think I had health insurance back then," the singer glibly recounted.

Most of the Goondas' hospital-baiting antics seem to spawn from Green, a lanky, pouty-lipped, vaguely effeminate frontman (Mick Jagger anyone?) who often dresses in tattered shirts and is by far the most animated member onstage. Off stage, though, he's the quietest and most mild-mannered. He's also something of the odd-duck-out in the tight-knit group: He attended the private Holy Family High School while all the others went to Chaska High, and he apparently was quite the jock back then.

"When Jackson told me Brenden was going to be the singer in the band, I didn't want to do it," Miller confided. Said Atkins, who has known Green since the second grade, "I never could've foreseen Brenden acting like he does now."

The difficult part, both he and his bandmates agree, is creating quality songs and capturing them on record. They got a pretty good start with their self-titled debut, produced by Rank Strangers frontman Mike Wisti and featuring such live staples as the North Mississippi-flavored "Jackalope Jesus" and the full-throttling punk romper "Raunch 216." They of course hope to one-up all those with their next record.

It seems that their bad experience at the 400 Bar continues to shape the Goondas' outlook. Said Atkins, "We're never going to be like Radiohead trying to write the next 'Kid A,' but we have to have music that's good enough to back up everything else we're doing."

Over beers at a dimly lit Acadia Cafe, the members of Phantom Tails are asked every band's least favorite question: What's your genre?

Without pause, but with a chuckle, the band replies in unison: "Deep space doom funk."

Is it a jab at music critics' overzealous genre-dubbing? Absolutely. But pressed harder, the group reveals the wisdom behind the smirk. "Deep space" hits on Phantom Tails' swirling, otherworldly keyboards. "Doom" hints at their gritty rock sound and dark lyrics. And "funk" is easy, as the Minneapolis synth-rockers' selection as one of First Avenue's Best New Bands has something to do with their knack for lighting up dance floors. With veteran players, a honed sound and a strong debut record, the band is swelling with buzz -- hype that they hope to parlay into a long career.

In Minnesota, the Phantom Tails formula began brewing. Treon and Hernandez played in indie octet Plastic Chord alongside Kerkhof, 24, and bassist Dave Dorman, 31. When Plastic Chord dissolved, the foursome trouped on, starting a new band that makes heavy use of Kerkhof's MPC-2000. A vintage 16-bit sampler that runs on 3.5-inch floppy discs, it's an analog bruiser that functions as the band's drums. Throw in some whale-song samples, a heavy dose of Hernandez's vintage keyboards and a guitar-rock punch, and you've got Phantom Tails.

"To pick up where this started - basically in a broken-down attic -- to where we are now, it's pretty amazing," Dorman reflects.

The lightning transition from attic to Best New Band was aided from the outset by a distinct sound. "There's nothing worse than a very boring band," Kerkhof says, noting that Phantom Tails' abrasive sound was a reactionary move against the slower, droning bands they were noticing. Their look doesn't hurt, either, with the heroin-chic Treon and top hat-sporting Hernandez oozing stage presence.

That driving aesthetic is captured on Phantom Tails' debut album, "Sounds of the Hunchback Whale." Released last summer, the record is a breakneck listen that slams through eight songs in 30 minutes. There's a split-personality, abstractionist vibe to the release, with circus playfulness instantly veering into dark melancholy. There's artfulness to the arrangements -- the band cites Brian Eno as an influence and, yes, samples whale sounds liberally.

"Whale songs are amazing," says Treon. "They'll repeat segments to create 40-minute long songs; it's like a chant. Logan can manipulate them into all sorts of sounds."

And with a rash of artists leaning on digital crutches these days, Phantom Tails are also prideful of their analog purism. "Regardless of how trendy it is, analog just provides much more texture," says Hernandez. Digital gear "would be like looking at a picture of a beach -- it's just this perfect, smooth photograph. Whereas [with analog] you're actually there, you feel the grains go between your feet."

That dedication to analog is rivaled only by Phantom Tails' dedication to their craft. "Regardless of any kind of ink we get, we'll continue to do this because it's the central focus of our lives," Hernandez said. All the members work day jobs and pour any residual cash into the band. "We're all extremely poor," laughs Treon.

Aided by flexible day jobs, the band's collective aim is touring; they're hitting the East Coast this month and eyeing the rest of the country for spring. "We're gonna be doing this for a long time," Treon says, hinting that their next release will make the logical transition from whale samples to jungle ones.

But what about the notoriously short buzz cycles afforded to local bands? Phantom Tails' answer is as automatic as the one about their sound.

"If anything, the life cycle of this band is just starting right now," Dorman says. "Any recognition -- to use a cliché -- is just warming to the cockles."

These poppy punk rockers could have been declared the scene's unequivocal It Kids over the past year. Except they aren't really kids. Co-leaders Christy Hunt and Arzu Gokcen first made their marks in the local scene years ago in Ouija Radio and the Selby Tigers, respectively. The youthful spark generated when they finally hooked up last year is a big part of the fun.

Guitar grinder Joe Hastings left the Fuck Knights to start his own thing, a scorching combo of surf-punk, psychobilly twang and psychedelic grunge, all of it heavily spiked with '60s garage-rock fuzz. It's catching on as fast as his playing.

Sort of like wholesome musical virgins, Polara frontman Ed Ackerson and the Mood Swings' co-leader Ashley Prenzlow put off starting a band together until after they got married, but then it was off to the races once they finally did hook up. In eight months' time, they issued four BNLX EPs loaded with '80s-echoing fuzz-pop, and it appears as if they're only getting started.

Two years after playing the Best New Bands show with Lookbook (R.I.P.), the electro-pop duo's sonic guru is back as a Leonard Cohen-heavy singer/songwriter with a dark, minimalist but often mesmerizing electronic backdrop à la the XX. His Lords lineup includes bassist Noah Paster (Askeleton) and drummer Matt Scharenbroich (the Plastic Constellations).

Hey, you gotta have a little kitsch at a new-bands show. A 26-year-old mash-up metalhead "raised on Casio keyboards and cartoons," per his Facebook page, Jake Sullivan has a pretty fun gimmick going on with his dizzying mix of fluorescent lighting, Girl Talk-lite samples and Guitar Hero-style licks. --Chris Riemenschneider